by Lucy Ives
Among female undergrads, the reigning look is prostitute, though other paths are explored: sexy nurse, sexy surgeon (for the ambitious), sexy CIA operative, sexy nun, sexy postal worker (with or without death-dealing firearm), sexy houseplant, along with an assortment of sexy animals and extremely sexy babies.
Loudermilk has elected to dress as sexy Groucho Marx. In Loudermilk’s conception, this disguise demands a bathrobe, wool socks, bedroom slippers, boxer shorts, glasses (with attached nose and mustache), fake eyebrows, and a six-inch fake cigar.
Harry says something about, Didn’t Groucho usually have some pajamas? Or maybe a three-piece suit plus tie? He seemed to have been fairly modest?
“Sack up, dude, because this is his behind-the-scenes look,” says Loudermilk. He is affixing the dark costume eyebrows to his blond eyebrows. “This is Groucho letting you know what Groucho is really all about.” Loudermilk is done with his toilette. He turns. “Because I know you’re still down to be Harpo?”
Harry retreats to the common area. “No thanks.”
“What?” Loudermilk is doing an overly nasal approximation of Groucho’s voice. “This is unacceptable. I’m having a beer and you’re having one, too, or should I say, three?”
Harry sinks into a chair, points to himself. “Working.”
Loudermilk continues, “With that kind of a show, who needs an audience! Fuck me,” he says, breaking character. “I sound like Looney Tunes Al Capone.” He goes into the fridge.
Harry reluctantly accepts a beer. “It’s not too late.”
“What, dude, for Al Capone? I don’t think so! This is much better. Better for conversation.” Loudermilk finishes his beer in one long draw. “So, Harrison, since you refuse my offer of relatable wingman, what, pray tell, are we going to do with ye?”
Harry blinks. “We’re not doing anything.”
“You keep saying that, but I really don’t think that’s what you’re saying, dude.”
“No, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Right, except that you’re not!” Loudermilk shakes his head. “Because no means yes, Harrison.”
Harry says that no definitely means exactly what it sounds like.
“With you, maybe. But you don’t see the bigger picture.”
Harry sips his beer. Dread is a lead bib. Loudermilk is a gas-happy dental technician. They have been playing this modified game of fort/da on and off for the past month. Harry tries a different tack. He asks, Has he not been writing the poems? Has he not graciously upheld his end of the bargain?
Loudermilk, behind glassless glasses, grins. “That’s very touching, Harrison. And, to remind you, it’s so far been just one poem. Which went over very well, spank you very much, and by the way I know you’ve been trying to milk that shit for all it’s worth. However, you and I both know there’s another side to this project, which involves me getting you up off of your veal-like caboose from time to time.”
“Not interested.”
“Harry, dude, I know you’re not, as you put it, ‘interested.’ That is the whole mother-loving point. Your lack of ‘interest,’ as you call it. It’s worrisome. It’s abnormal. It’s going to ruin your life. We’ve been through this.”
Harry’s stomach is beginning to bother him.
“I am trying to help you. You comprehend that, right?” Loudermilk withdraws and returns in seconds with a white sheet. “Here, for you, you fucking crazy diamond,” he says, flourishing the bedding. He goes into the kitchen and gets a steak knife and rips a pair of crude holes in the material. He drops the sheet over Harry’s head. “Shine on.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“I find zero humor in your predicament, Harrison. Thus I’m one-hundred-percent honest-to-god serious, and non, non, non this is not my idea of une très funny joke, as the Frenchies like to say, right before they go off to do something esoteric and cowardly. This is, like, the ideal. I’m a fucking genius and I’m cooking with lava. Now, let’s get a move on. Party’s at butter-face Christy’s, and I want to be drinking her liquor before I’m back around here having”—Loudermilk pauses—“whatever I’m having.”
Harry doesn’t say anything.
Loudermilk, in a mechanical rage, drags Harry outdoors.
Only on the street does Harry cease resisting. It’s dark out, very dark, and Harry realizes that this is because the streetlamps in the area have been covered with heavy-duty black contractor’s bags and duct tape. The lawn of the neighboring frat has blazing tiki torches in it.
As Loudermilk and Harry come to the end of the block they hear behind them the unmistakable smacking, popping sound of Evelyn’s shack-shaped source of retirement mad money being mercilessly egged.
Loudermilk speeds up. “Don’t look back,” he says out of the side of his mouth. He pulls Harry around the corner. “Biblical, right? I’m saying, see, dude, aren’t you glad I didn’t leave you in there without supervision? I mean, home invasion much? Would you really put that past these shitcanned hyenas? Trust me that you’re way better off out here with me.”
Harry has to hold the eyeholes in place, otherwise they have a tendency to be tugged up to the top of his head when he walks. He lets Loudermilk steer him downtown.
Twenty-Four
Soft Power
Christy’s house, it turns out, is a pink affair. She has the whole bottom floor of a 1960s split-level, and wherever the walls are not covered with fake wood paneling, they’ve been painted a bright, labial blush. There are a couple of white-shag area rugs and, somehow, a crystal chandelier. A stuffed black squirrel with a head like a rotten chestnut clings quirkily to a stick atop one bookshelf.
The house is full of Seminars people. Loudermilk pats Harry on the head. “This is going to be fun for you, little Casper.”
Harry fusses with his eyeholes.
Christy makes them. “Oh my god, Big L? Is that you? Oh my god, Groucho? How funny! How adorable! You are so brilliant.”
“Thanks, babe.” Loudermilk takes it in stride. “Love that new haiku series, by the way. Been all over it this afternoon. Gotta email you later.”
Christy is posing. She is wearing sexy dead-person makeup, a vintage housedress with strategic scorching, and has the outer casing of what was once a toaster oven over her head. Harry doesn’t need to read the crazily inked extra-large title on the extra-large “book” in Christy’s left hand to know that it says Ariel. “C’mon, Loudermilk.” Christy pouts, admitting zero interest in the presence of Harry. “This should be easy for you!”
“Nice appliance!” Loudermilk fudges, rolling his eyes and wiggling the brows.
Christy giggles.
Loudermilk bangs Christy on the top of her oven several times with his cigar, saying, “I hope to see you again shortly.”
“Sure,” Christy replies, perhaps even wistfully, though it is difficult to be certain in the crush.
Loudermilk pilots Harry before him until they come to a table decorated with hard stuff of many shapes and shades. “Now, who the hell is she supposed to be, dude, because I know you fucking know.”
Harry shrugs.
“Oh, no, no, no! You need to let me in on this one. This is about our careers.” Loudermilk is reaching around among the bottles, checking labels.
“If I tell you who she is, then can I leave?”
Loudermilk is dumping quantities of tequila over an ice cube. “Stick that under your shroud.”
Harry receives the drink.
“Drink up and consider what you just said.” Loudermilk is fixing himself a double. “You’re stressing me out, you know that?”
Given the lack of an immediate escape route, Harry decides to halfway acquiesce. The tequila splashes pleasantly against the front of his brain. “Anne Sexton,” he mutters. “Pretty obvious.” He uncovers his cup for seconds.
Loudermilk holds the bottle poised. “And who is that?”
Harry says that Anne Sexton is an American poet. This, at any rate, is true.
The cup is filled.
Harry adds that she was an incredible cook.
“Kinky,” Loudermilk muses.
“I guess.”
“No, I mean the girl, that Christy. She’s quite the kinkster. I wonder what she’s trying to tell me?”
Harry is drinking tequila.
“With a name like that—Sex-ton. I mean, like you say, you can’t get much more obvious! But seriously though, dude.” Loudermilk sets down the bottle. “I’ve been thinking about it. A lot of these people like I could just kind of do without them or whatever, right? But some of them, I mean, like, at least one of them? Must be kind of smart or whatever and maybe they would, you know, get you? You know?” Loudermilk attempts to gaze penetratingly into Harry’s sheet. “Fuck, that thing is uncanny.”
“It was your idea.”
“You see what I’m saying?” Loudermilk refills Harry’s cup.
“I can’t really see anything.”
Loudermilk is gazing around the room. “They like what you do, dude. You realize that, right? I mean, they think they like what I do, but you know what I’m saying. They fucking loved ‘Writing Teacher.’ These are probably, like, your people or something. I mean, maybe if all were right with the world you’d just be out here on your own, being a poet or something. Happy and whatnot. I do kind of think about that at times. I’m not a total craven douche.”
Harry thanks Loudermilk for his solicitude.
“What?”
“Your kindness.”
“Sorry, dude. Sheet.”
“Thanks for caring.”
“So listen,” Loudermilk is saying, “I’m gonna go back and check in with Christy and so forth, make sure she’s enjoying her party, compliment her on her look, shoot the shit, testify to my knowledge of sexy Sex-ton? I’m not going to promise you I’m gonna return right away, but I will be back. Main thing is, you can handle this. You’re ready for a solo mission if ever anyone was, and I can’t keep holding you back, see, killing you with my kindness?”
It’s not that Loudermilk is suddenly successfully doing the Groucho voice or moving his eyebrows or anything like that, but he seems momentarily so much more convincingly Groucho-esque than ever before. It’s as if he’s leaning, like, a mile out of the fake glasses. It’s as if he, too, is experiencing this weird plane of private mental ecstasy along which all of Groucho’s characters seem, magnetically and maniacally, to float. Or: the analogy holds for a second, but then it’s gone, because Loudermilk is off, bobbing through the party like he is the best friend a party ever had.
Other revelers seek comfort at the bar. They are reaching around and muttering and giggling. There is a black cat with grease-paint whiskers, an Olympic gymnast, a dude with a potbelly dressed as a bumblebee. Harry shuts his eyes and backs away from the table.
Harry’s not paying very good attention, obviously he’s not, there’s just a lot going on that he could process if he cared to, that he could make sense of, perceive, if he wanted to, if he cared to involve himself in any of it. But all of this, the party and its din, its chatter, has no use for him. It has never understood a word that Harry’s said, so why should Harry, in a room full of strangers, suddenly want to tamper with it? This—this floaty and vaguely inebriated misery that Harry’s currently in—is just the way things work.
Harry is still moving backward when his head contacts a wall with a painful crack Harry is certain must be audible throughout the room. He stays standing exactly where he is, skull throbbing, and prays that everyone else is so wasted plus self-absorbed that they are either going to be uninterested in the event that produced this noise or assume that it is a result of their own Seminars-approved imaginations.
Harry groans, as waves of pain slosh ominously up the back of his skull. Stillness, he reasons, may be the only first aid available. There’s the additional unpleasant fact that Loudermilk’s university health insurance will cover only the body of Loudermilk, no matter what happens to this body’s rather more compound mind, a significant portion of which is housed in Harry’s dome.
This is when Harry hears, at his left, a low voice, a female voice: “That had to hurt.”
Cautiously, Harry nods. He feels tears form at the corners of his eyes.
“Wow. I bet.” The speaker is not exactly sympathetic, but at least her assessment is accurate.
Harry wants to turn and examine the source of these words, but he knows that motion will lead to additional cascading signals of trauma, so he stays put.
“Don’t move. Maybe I can get you ice,” the voice says.
The next thing that there is in front of Harry’s face is the face of Bill Clinton. The forty-second president is, with astonishing gentleness, lifting Harry’s head away from the wall just enough to slide a bag of cold substance behind it. Harry is not able to see much inside the mask’s eyeholes. The Bill Clinton appears to smile.
Harry swallows.
“You should say something. That would be my recommendation.” The Bill Clinton reassumes its earlier position to Harry’s left.
Harry nods.
“How do you feel?”
“OK,” he whispers. It is like someone else has uttered the two letters. Harry waits.
The Bill Clinton is speaking. “I’m glad you’re OK. Anyway. Not to dwell.”
“No.” It’s like there’s someone completely normal saying these things, someone with an unremarkable, working voice, someone Harry doesn’t know, someone Harry can control.
“I’m not condoning this party, by the way.” The Bill Clinton laughs. Its hair is painted white. “I’m just here.”
“Cool,” says Harry. This comes out perfectly noncommittal, just a word anyone would have heard a million times.
“I thought it was more normal than staying home. Anyway, I have this.” The Bill Clinton points at its/her head. “I was thinking, you know, it’s difficult, kind of, to find a use for this kind of thing?”
Harry knows there is something called for here, some quip or whatever, something to let her know he’s hearing what she’s saying, what she, specifically is saying, that he has some idea who she is, but now he’s, more characteristically, mute.
“You a writer?” She makes an effort.
“Am I?” There’s a squeak at the end, some of the old, true Harry. He presses his lips together.
She laughs again. “I mean, it’s totally possible that you could be a writer, right?”
“Anything is.”
The Bill Clinton nods. She folds her arms across her chest. “So, uh, what do you write?”
“Whatever they tell me to.”
“Really? That’s too bad.”
“Not really.” Harry is starting to enjoy himself. “I pretend.” His head hurts less, almost not at all. There’s just this infinitesimal, dull worry.
“You do fiction? Poetry?”
“Poetry.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” The Bill Clinton seems to be looking around the room.
“I’m Troy,” Harry for some reason volunteers.
“Cool. Hi, Troy,” the Bill Clinton is telling him. Her tone suggests a frown. “Hey, it was nice talking.” She pushes herself off the wall and fixes him with what would probably be a human smile if there were not a smiling mask obscuring it. She slips back into the crush of bodies just as House of Pain’s mammoth single, “Jump Around,” begins working its nostalgic enticement upon the well-lubricated crowd.
Twenty-Five
Lists
Harry is home, planning his day. His notebook is open and he has drawn the face of a watch, a wristwatch. Maybe it’s a little crude but it helps him to see. He puts in hours, 1 through 12. It is approximately 10:00 a.m. now, and he circles the 10. He draws a line from the 10 and writes, Focus in on time, lists. Then he goes around the watch and adds activities for the day’s remaining hours. For 11 he appends, More lists. For 12, Lists again but turn on radio. For 1, Radio transc
ription. For 2, I’ll read the newspaper. For 3, New thoughts. For 4 and 5 he writes, Composing a poem and Composing a poem more. For 6, Beer. For 7, Books/reading. For 8, Look at poem again. And 9, Contemplate sleep.
Harry glances at 10. He crosses it out and feels ready. He begins a list:
Questions
•Do I want something to eat?
•Yes or no?
•Can I just sit here?
•Yes or no?
•Does it matter what I do?
•Yes or no?
•Can I avoid easy questions?
•Do I know what I am doing?
•Do I know what I will do?
•If I know what I will do, will I do it?
•Yes or no?
•How to act?
•How can I act?
•Am I writing?
•Yes or no?
•Am I writing now?
•Who is writing?
•Who are all the people?
•What is the origin of the world?
Harry pauses. It’s early but he’s thinking about turning on the radio.
He decides, with a small ache, that he will attempt to maintain the schedule for now. He turns to a fresh page:
New Questions
•Am I the one who is writing these words?
•Can I be sure of this?
•Who is the one who is writing?
•Who’s he?
•Does he sound like this?
•Do I sound like this?
•Does he like this?
•What is behind what he is doing?
•What inspires his poems?
•Does he do this for me?
•Does he exist for me?
•How does he exist?
•Why does he exist?
•Why do I know him?
•Why do I know he is here?
•Will he always be here?
•Yes or no?
•Will he always be with me?
•How will I know he is writing a poem?
Harry can still hear street noises, the vague natural sounds of what’s left of an area woodland, formerly prairie; insects sawing the cool-ish air, cars.